In Her Shoes

I’m going to butcher this.. but there’s a quote that I heard or read somewhere that says something like: You can never fully understand a person unless you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.

How true that is.. You know, I’ve been in a season of silence. A place where I have been able to listen rather than being heard. I’ve been observant rather than being seen. And allow me to say, there’s so much to learn. I knew going into this season that there was much to learn, I just didn’t know how much I would learn. I also had no clue what the lesson would be.

I love that about God. He shows up right on time and teaches us just what we need, when we need it, when we didn’t know we needed it.

They say: Be kind to everyone you meet, because they may be fighting a bigger/worse battle than you know. (Or something like that, I’m not doing so great with the quotes today.)

I met a woman not to long ago. A kind, older woman with a warm smile. She had a lot to say. She spoke to me about how God is blessing her. Her car had been repossessed. She’s now working two jobs. 2p-10p one job. And 11p to 8a the next, 5 days a week. The same days off at both jobs. She was upbeat about it. Positive. It was a blessing! Everything age had lost was being restored. She’d soon have furniture.

I began calculating the time. The hours. Surely on her working days, she would get roughly 3.5 to 4 hours of sleep?

I vowed to not complain about not getting a full 8 hours or more of sleep again.

I try to maintain an attitude of gratitude. Because believe me, I know that God has been better than good to me! He has truly blessed me beyond measure. If He never does anything else for me, everything He has done up until this point will have been enough to last a lifetime.

While I’m in this season of silence, and learning to listen… I’m humbled. There are so many with stories to tell of the goodness of God. Miracles are all around us in our everyday lives. We cannot despise the “little things”. Although I’ve come to understand, there’s no such thing as a “little thing”. God is in everything. From our first breath to our last. From our first steps to our last. He’s in our coming and our going. Our successes and our opportunities to try again or grow. He’s there when we fall and He’s there to help us up. He’s in everything.

Do we invite Him into everything? Do we welcome Him in?

For this season, I’ve dropped my titles, my accolades, my degrees – all of it. They mean nothing to me. In this season, I’m not known for what I’ve done or accomplished. And in it, my prayer is that when they see me, that they will see Jesus living in me. That I won’t waste my time or words idly. That I will listen and gain every lesson that I am supposed to learn in this incredibly humbling season.